Evidence of meeting #34 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was glick.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:55 p.m.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Thank you, Chair.
Mr. Glick, who at Google could explain to us which U.S. laws are in play in terms of the analysis that needs to be done regarding the destruction of the Canadian data held in the United States?
4:55 p.m.
Canada Policy Counsel, Google Inc.
I don't know specifically who that would be. I'd have to consult internally.
4:55 p.m.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Could you do that and let us know who at Google would be the person who could answer those kinds of questions for us?
4:55 p.m.
Canada Policy Counsel, Google Inc.
I can do that, but I should say that if the committee is interested in learning more about analysis of U.S. law, there will be all sorts of.... There are a lot of complications and moving parts to this. It might make sense, if the committee continues to be interested in this, to give us the chance to actually undertake the analysis and to conclude what we can and can't do. We can write to the committee at that time, when we write to the Privacy Commissioner to advise her of the conclusions of the analysis--
5 p.m.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Thank you, Mr. Glick.
But I do suspect that Google has done some of that analysis already if they've already moved to destroy data held from some countries as opposed to others, if all the data was held in the United States. I do hear your point on that, but I am interested in finding out who at Google could explain which U.S. laws are in play here.
I have another question about the specific technology that Google deployed in the cars. I understand that a particular program developed by the engineer at Google is responsible for collecting the payload data. I just wanted to know if Google sold, leased, or lent to any other company or agency--or anyone else--this particular program, so that someone else might have used this in the same way that Google did and didn't know they were collecting the payload data. Was anyone else using this particular program?
5 p.m.
Engineering Lead for Privacy, Google Inc.
To the best of my knowledge--and I would be surprised if my knowledge is not correct--this code was entirely inside Google and was never shared.
5 p.m.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Okay.
I wanted to ask another question. This is going back to the street-imaging question. I know that when we first addressed the street-imaging question, Google did undertake to destroy the unblurred images that Google felt it was necessary to keep for a year, I believe. I'm just going from memory here, so maybe I should be corrected. I also understood that they would hold those images outside of Canada as well, but that they would be destroyed after a year. Have any of those images been destroyed at this point?
I guess I should have asked the first question: when did Google first start the street-imaging process in Canada? Has that deadline of a year passed in the collection of any of those street images and has that led to the destruction of the unblurred images?
5 p.m.
Canada Policy Counsel, Google Inc.
Sir, I can report back that what we said was we would “bake in the blur” one year after the publication of the imagery, and as far as I understand it, we've done that successfully.
5 p.m.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
So you've baked in the blur, but what about the original images that were collected, the unblurred ones. Have they been destroyed?
5 p.m.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
So it's through that process of baking in, so there isn't a separate data bank of unblurred and blurred images?
5 p.m.
Canada Policy Counsel, Google Inc.
No. “Baking in” is a term of art; I think maybe I invented it. I'll claim credit in any event, even if I didn't. So for a year there would be, as you say, two corpuses of data, the public data to which the blur is applied, and the data held internally. At the end of a year, post-publication, there is no longer any data that has unblurred imagery in it. The same data that Google has is the imagery that's public, which is including the blur. I understand that's been done for the Canadian imagery.
5 p.m.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Chair, I just had one request for information from our witnesses from Google. I wonder if it would be possible to get a list of countries in which payload data was collected and an indication of where and when it was destroyed, and also where that data was stored for each particular country, so that we know, for instance, if it was collected in a country where it was stored and whether it's been destroyed at this point.
5 p.m.
Canada Policy Counsel, Google Inc.
I did hear it, Mr. Chair, and I'd be happy to undertake to answer the member's question in writing.
I should say, thought, that the process we've gone through here in Canada is being played out in other countries of the world, and as investigations conclude in those countries and a similar analysis is undertaken, the answer may change. So whatever I tell you will be for a specific point in time, but it may be that afterwards we'd delete some data. But yes, the answer is that I will provide in writing to the committee, to the best of our knowledge, the answers to those questions.
5:05 p.m.
Liberal
5:05 p.m.
Canada Policy Counsel, Google Inc.
I think that should be fine. If there's a problem with that, I'll let you know.
5:05 p.m.
Canada Policy Counsel, Google Inc.
If a problem arises, give me till the seventeenth.
5:05 p.m.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Could I ask two more quick questions, Mr. Chair? I hope they're quick. I don't know if you have other people on your list.
5:05 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Perhaps I'll come back to you, Mr. Siksay.
I just have an issue that we have to get addressed, Mr. Ramsay. This is on the whole issue of your launch of Canada Eye. There was a press release from your company in March. According to my reading of it, you're combining information taken from the iPhone 3GS compass, GPS systems, and video cameras simultaneously to determine information on where a person is. Then you can identify nearby businesses and how people can get there in real time, which would include the direction and distance.
This kind of follows up on some of the issues that Dr. Bennett was raising. Do you feel that all of these systems working simultaneously meet with the Canadian privacy legislation policies?
5:05 p.m.
Senior Vice-President, General Counsel, Secretary and Responsible for Privacy, Yellow Pages Group Co.
The answer, to the best of my knowledge, is yes. Specifically on smartphones, for instance, the service we're using to provide directions for people is, again, with services that are provided by the likes of Google and Microsoft.